"the map is not the territory"
Alfred Korzybski - General semantics - "the map is not the territory,"
"it is like a man who is hungry. Any amount of description of food will never satisfy him"
Paraphrase Bateson's argument, a culture that believes that common colds are transmitted by evil spirits, that those spirits fly out of you when you sneeze, can pass from one person to another when they are inhaled or when both handle the same objects, etc., could have just as effective a "map" for public health as one that substituted microbes for spirits
Neuro-linguistic programming, where it is used to signify that individual people in fact do not in general have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality.
The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as mathematics.
Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is.
"Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable."
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